What You Should Know About Data, Math, and Computing

Data mining and machine learning are intimately connected through the availability of well-curated data, high-level computer programming languages, data visualization, mathematics, and statistics. At the intersection between these different fields, typically a number of different notations are used, which sometimes makes ML and data mining literature a bit difficult to access for someone who is new to this field. In this chapter we start with an overview of the most important notations and conventions, followed by an introduction of the foundations for describing datasets mathematically and conceptually, as well as in Python code.